Poverty and Texas

by Editor
June 30, 2014 at 9:28 am

https://www.smartertimes.com/1239/poverty-and-texas

A front-page New York Times article reports on poverty amidst the oil boom in Texas, 50 years after Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. The Times article blames Republicans and the "philosophy of limited government" for the abject conditions of the state's poor:

despite the boom, Texas has some of the highest rates of poverty in the nation and ranks first in the percentage of residents without health insurance. Republican leaders have supported tapping the Rainy Day Fund for one-time investments in water and transportation infrastructure, but they have blocked attempts to use the fund for education and other services, arguing that it was designed to cover emergencies and not recurring expenses.

"Despite the bounty of the Eagle Ford, which is considerable and on the whole clearly positive, it is not a rising tide that lifts all boats," said Ray Perryman, a leading Texas economist and author based in Waco. He noted that Texas had long had a philosophy of limited government and an aversion to spending on social services, an attitude intensified by the current political environment.

"Texas is not a good place to be poor, and there is little political appetite for change," he said.

It sounds at least plausible, perhaps — until one remembers another recent Times deep reportorial dive into the topic of poverty, the story of Dasani, an 11-year-old who lived for three years with her parents and seven siblings in a single room of a fetid homeless shelter in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. New York City, unlike Texas, has no "aversion to spending on social services," and its politics are dominated by the Democratic Party, not the Republican one. But New York City, by the Times account, isn't a good place to be poor, either, which makes one wonder why the Times is trying to score political points against Republicans or the "philosophy of limited government" in today's Texas story.

The whole phrase "philosophy of limited government" is itself something of a puzzler. What. after all, is the alternative? Does the Times favor a government without limits? It's not entirely clear that Texas Republicanism, with its enthusiasm for capital punishment and for laws prohibiting abortion, is exactly explainable by the phrase "philosophy of limited government." Further, "limited government" isn't something unique to Texas. The Constitution, which enumerates certain powers for the federal government and, in the Bill of Rights, expressly limits those powers, is an example of the philosophy of limited government. It applies to the entire United States.

Finally, absent from the Times story is any recognition or discussion of the fact that compared to Mexico or the rest of Latin America or lots of rural Asia and Africa, Texas is a good place to be poor, or at least a better place to be poor. By third-world standards, America's poor are rich. That doesn't make the Times article about poverty in Texas any less sad or heart-tugging, but it does seem a little odd for the Times to run this whole article deploring the horrible conditions in Texas without mentioning that tens of thousands of people are taking severe risks to sneak into America, past fences and border guards, across deserts, for the chance to experience them.